In the 2016 Campaign, US Foreign Policy Establishment Not Faring Well Either

After months of reality-show media coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign,
the voting process is thankfully starting. As the voters begin to speak, perhaps
the coverage will have more actual reality in it. In recent years, it is no
secret that media coverage of elections virtually ignores where the candidates
stand on major issues, in favor of the "horse race" involving candidates’
political strategies and tactics, and now has even become merely celebrity gossip.
One cynical analyst once said that politics is just Hollywood for ugly people.

So it should be no secret that Donald Trump, one of the kings of "reality"
TV, has done much better than anyone ever thought he would. Outsiders in both
parties seem to have performed better in this circus, because voters seem to
be angry that, for decades, they have been repeatedly promised a fix to Washington’s
dysfunction – the most recent billed as "hope and change" – only to see
the same old shenanigans continue there.

Similar public frustration with U.S. foreign policy is not reported much in
the media – because it does not boost ratings or numbers of subscribers as much
as sensational coverage of minor terrorist attacks. Although out of this excessive
media-induced fear, a slim majority of Americans want something done militarily
about ISIS, the brutal Islamist terrorist group, they don’t want another long
Iraq – or Afghanistan – like quagmire in the greater Middle East involving American
boots on the ground. Unfortunately, one cannot eradicate ISIS military without
ground forces; using local ground forces is the best option, but in Iraq and
Syria, where the ISIS "caliphate" exists, friendly local forces are
either unreliable, meager, or virtually nonexistent. Attacks from the air – the
major thrust of current US policy – inadvertently kill civilians, which enrages
the population and likely only creates more terrorists than it kills.

This underlying reluctance of large swaths of the American electorate of both
parties to continue such long-standing US meddling in faraway conflicts –
which it intuitively, if vaguely, realizes is the major cause of blowback terrorism
– is reflected by the better-than-expected standing of antiestablishment
candidates, such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz on the Republican side and Bernie
Sanders on the Democratic side. Although Trump and Cruz have made some over-the-top
comments about bombing ISIS into smithereens, in general they are less hawkish
than the mainstream candidates, with their traditional Republican jingoistic
foreign policy: Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush. Moreover,
the pall of George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War still hangs over the 2016 election
to such an extent that so far, the candidacy of Bush #3 – who the at the
beginning of the campaign in 2015 the media was trying to anoint as the Republican
frontrunner – has done abysmally.

In fact, Trump shows at least some indication of being in the realist (rather
than reality-show) foreign policy school by his astute advocacy of outsourcing
the Syrian problem to the Russians – after all, when your enemies are fighting
each other, let them, while also keeping the Russians busy in a nasty civil
war that has "bog" written all over it. Also, Trump convincingly argues
for renegotiating the expensive U.S.-Japan alliance, which for decades has permitted
a wealthy country to save resources by allowing the United States to protect
it, while throwing those extra resources into competition with US companies
and restricting its market to those same companies. Furthermore, as many foreign
policy realists do, Trump has said that US foreign policy should be designed
to safeguard only US interests, more narrowly defined – omitting such things
as advocacy for human rights, democracy promotion, humanitarian military interventions,
and the responsibility to protect people overseas from harm. He believes correctly
that economic engagement with dictatorships has the best chance of opening them
politically in the in the long term. He rejects the neo-conservative doctrine
of remodeling countries into shaky democracies by using military force –
that is he was against the Iraq War. According to journalist Josh Rogin, Sam
Clovis, a retired Air Force colonel and Trump’s chief policy adviser, criticized
neo-conservatives who "think you can go out there and in three weeks after
Iraq collapses you can create a constitutional democracy over there."

Ted Cruz has characterized his foreign policy views as somewhere between the
aggressiveness of John McCain and Marco Rubio at one end of the spectrum and
the much less interventionist Rand Paul at the other end. For example, Cruz
has cogently argued, "The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
If the Obama administration and the Washington neo-cons succeed in toppling
[Bashar al-] Assad, Syria will be handed over to radical Islamic terrorists.
ISIS will rule Syria."

On the left, Bernie Sanders, although not totally dovish, was against the Kosovo
War in 1999 and W’s Iraq War. In fact, he trumpets that on the seminal foreign
policy issue of our time, he was against the invasion of Iraq and Hillary, always
very hawkish, was for it.

Thus, at least a ray of hope exists that America’s exhaustion with the long
foreign quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan is casting a long, if barely visible,
shadow on the 2016 presidential campaign.